The Smoly Adventures

Hey everyone.  First off, life just plain gets in the way of posting blog entries with any sort of frequency. Between grad school for me, an inordinate amount of paperwork that we had to complete for our adoption, multiple family visits between October and January, time has gotten away from us. So where are we with in our whole adoption process?

We finally turned our paperwork into our agency in December, but due to Christmas and New Year's, we didn't start the actual interviews until January.  After three interviews with our social worker Rachel, and a bit of waiting, we got the formal notification yesterday that our home study was approved and that we're now in the waiting pool. But what does that mean...

Simply, we will start being shown to birth parents as soon as we complete our profile book and provide copies to Hope's Promise. We're about 75% done with our book (no thanks to a Shutterfly hiccup), and we're hoping to press the order button here in the next week or so. Once Hope's Promise has them, its truly a waiting game, but as a good friend told Janet on Facebook this morning "You know what this means? You're expecting :)"  We're just blessed that we get to experience the true depths of God's timeline for us in this process. We are trusting completely in his perfect timing for us and our future child. We're both so excited to have made it to this point in the process. It has been a long journey and we are so blessed to have all of you alongside us during this journey. 

Janet and I had our first official home study appointment with Hope's Promise this past week. Wow... I (we) knew that there was alot of paperwork, but neither of us had a full appreciation for the level of detail we would encounter. While we were able to complete some of the required forms right there during the meeting, we still returned home with a 1.5" thick binder of additional paperwork we needed to complete. Needless to say, we are going to be fairly busy over the coming months.

On a related note, Janet and I have decided that we will be conducting a fundraiser for our adoption. More to come on this in a future blog post.

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved.”